by Kat Ross
“Ja,” Alexei said dryly. “You want something.”
“Yes, I want something.” She handed him a thick file. “I do not trust you, and you do not trust me. This much is clear. However, I trust others even less. You are an outsider. Whatever your intentions, I do not believe they are related to this case.”
He accepted the folder, curiosity sparking.
“Over the last year, there has been a rash of disappearances.” Her voice hardened. “Children. This sort of crime is unheard of. The Polizei are useless. We have no equivalent of your OGD here. No domestic surveillance apparatus.” She smiled. “It is illegal, ja, but I know what Kireyev does. Spare me the denials.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Read the file. Then you will give me your opinion on an investigative approach. It should keep you out of trouble for a while.”
He scanned the file. “I don’t speak much Kven.”
“You’ll find a translation at the back. There is an empty office across the hall. You may work out of it while the arrangement lasts.” By her tone, she didn’t expect that to be very long.
“These children, are they light-bringers?”
Her gaze narrowed.
“I’m just wondering if you have the same problem regarding bloodlines and if there might be a connection.”
“The children are regular children. As to the question of Marks, that is the Reverend Father’s concern. The last time I checked, he had not taken you into his confidence.”
Her light green eyes gave little away, but Alexei took that as a yes. So the Curia was in crisis. He wondered what Luk was doing about it.
“Do you plan to monitor my every move?”
“No. You’ve been given apartments in the Wohnturm and will enjoy the freedom to go where you please. You would be of no use to me otherwise. But this latitude will be withdrawn at the first sign of misbehavior. I might be a pacifist, but you would not like to annoy me, Fra Bryce.”
Bishop Morvana tossed him the corax without a word and returned to her paperwork.
He bowed his head. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
“We will meet again at nine bells tomorrow morning.” She did not look up.
His new accommodations were in a tower house not far from the Markhound kennels. The architectural style was unique to Kvengard and found throughout the city. The bottom half comprised a windowless tower with thick walls, whilst the upper half looked like a miniature castle complete with turrets and battlements. They were originally built for defensive purposes, but after climbing a gloomy, cramped staircase, Alexei discovered rooms that were surprisingly bright and comfortable.
He had a sleigh bed made of old mellow wood and a desk with rows of little drawers and cubbyholes that contained pens, a supply of ink and parchment. The window overlooked a garden in the Kven tradition, with straight, orderly paths bordered in white stones and shrubs pruned into geometric shapes. Alexei lit a candle and set the file aside. He’d have to read it before morning, but he had no intention of staying here long.
Mikhail was out there somewhere.
In the Black Zone.
With a mentally ill pontifex who was using him to carry out a murderous vendetta against the Church.
There was nothing Alexei could do about the mages, or the mess in Jalghuth, but he could find his brother. What they would do then, Alexei didn’t know, but he wouldn’t abandon Misha. Never again.
He sank into a chair carved with a Running Wolf, selected a pen, and dipped the nib into the ink pot.
Dear Father,
I have gone to Kvengard to work in their legal office for a while. I have no word of Mikhail. Have you learned anything? Please write to me at the Arx, in care of Archbishop Morvana at the Office of the Nuncio, if he is found, or if you hear anything at all . . . .”
Alexei stared at the letter for a long minute. Then he tore it into pieces and threw them into the wastebasket. Contacting his father would only bring him trouble. The same went for Kasia Novak. And he very much doubted he would be here long enough to receive a response anyway. He would have left that very night, but he still felt weak. A few more days would likely make no difference and he needed to be fit when he entered the Morho if he ever hoped to leave the forest alive.
Alexei eyed the large bed, with its goosedown pillows and soft wool blanket. His eyelids drooped. He covered a yawn. Just a quick nap.
He lay down, stared at the ceiling for an hour or so, then got up and lit more candles. Night had fallen and the sky was alive with stars—another peculiarity. Kvengard’s peninsula shared the same latitude as Novostopol, but was rocky and windswept, with hot, dry summers.
Alexei dragged an armchair near the window to catch the faint breeze. Then he opened the file on the missing children and started to read.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The pills swam out of focus, hazy blobs in his palm.
One pink. One white.
Malach couldn’t remember which did what, but it didn’t matter since they were the last ones anyway. He tipped his head back and swallowed them dry. His gut was a throbbing white-hot coal.
The silver sports car sat at a fork in the road. The left side went to Bal Kirith. The right side went to the coast. A town had stood nearby once. Malach didn’t know what it was called, but after Lezarius made the Void and the shells started falling, everyone fled. It was summertime and a traveling carnival had been camped next to the crossroads. They left the carousel rusting in a field of high grass. It might have been pretty once, but the paint was peeling and the lips of the horses pulled back from their big square teeth in agonized grimaces, wooden bodies frozen in mid-gallop, and the whole thing looked frankly demonic, which is how, even in his disoriented state, Malach knew exactly where they were.
He’d woken up long enough to guide Nikola through back roads around the Fort of Saint Jule and take some pills, then passed out again. Three things kept him going now.
Finding Lezarius.
Killing Falke.
And convincing Nikola to help him.
He’d made her a promise and meant to keep it, but he wasn’t willing to die for it. Not yet.
She’d gotten out to pee. Now she came back.
“Better do a tick check,” he mumbled. “That grass is infested.”
The pain started to fade and he sagged against the seat. Malach mourned the lack of more pills, then realized she was snapping her fingers to get his attention.
“We have two hundred k’s left on the battery. How far is the coast?”
“About that, give or take.” Things were getting slippery and he forced himself to focus. “But I need you to take me to Bal Kirith first. If I don’t get medical treatment in the next few hours, maybe less, I’m going to die.”
She didn’t look very sorry for him. “You told me Beleth would kill me.”
“Only if she knows you’re pregnant.”
“Oh. Well, that’s reassuring. I’m fine with going to see your batshit crazy aunt, who may or may not try to murder me.”
“Please, Nikola.”
“I thought the city was a ruin.”
He blinked, slowly. “We have a vet.”
“You have a vet.” She shook her head. “Like an animal doctor?”
“He’s my only chance.”
He glanced down at the gauze bandage around his abdomen. The Wards at the edge of the city had undone most of Ani’s work. It was stiff with foul fluids. He felt nauseous and feverish. His heart was beating too fast.
Nikola kicked the tire and swore. “The City of the Damned? I’d rather be back at the Arx, scrubbing floors. One of you is bad enough, but a whole . . . .”
A tiny spider rappelled down from the sun visor above the passenger seat, hovering in front of his face. The silken strand spun and whirled. Malach watched its progress with rapt fascination.
“ . . . you even listening?”
“What?”
She stared at him, her expression unread
able. “Just before we stopped, you said something about dead babies. What were you talking about?”
He must have been rambling in his sleep. “Oh, that,” he said, still watching the spider. “I had a deal with Falke to give him a child.”
“Why?”
“He said he wanted to redeem our race.”
“And why would you cooperate with that horseshit? You’re not an idiot. Well, not all of the time.”
“He stopped shelling. Pulled out the knights and left us alone. He called it the Cold Truce.”
She frowned. “So it was a few years ago?”
A faint warning bell was going off in his head somewhere, but it seemed like too much effort to determine the source. He felt very, very good now.
“I’m not the first, am I? There must be other women you’ve made this deal with.”
He gently blew at the silk, sending the spider swinging to and fro.
“Seven.”
A hiss of indrawn breath. “Where are the kids?”
“Stillborn.”
“And the women?”
“They survived. Two are sterile though.”
“Saints! Why didn’t you offer Falke this one?”
“Because I want it myself. I want you, too—”
“Oh, don’t you even dare. Conniving, selfish son of a bitch! I ought to leave you here.”
Nikola stalked down the cracked asphalt and stood with her back to him. He heard muttered arguing and more curses. A minute later, she stomped back. Tears stood in her eyes. “You’re going to keep your end of our deal.” She stabbed a finger at him. “I need you alive for that. Which means you get to see a veterinarian, you heartless bastard.”
The curtain was falling. He fought to stay awake. “I don’t deny that I am those things, and worse. But I promise I’ll do better. I promise—”
“Shut up, Malach.” Nikola threw the car into gear and started down the lefthand fork.
* * *
The track was so overgrown, Nikola could hardly make it out in the thickening twilight. She flipped on the high beams. Clouds of insects swarmed in the headlights, along with larger fluttering things that might have been bats. Every few kilometers, she passed the skeleton of a vehicle being slowly devoured by the jungle.
The needle for the battery hovered near zero. Malach slumped against the window, muttering. A dozen times she almost turned around and drove back to that fork in the road, but it wasn’t as if there were towns along the coast. No taverns you could swagger into, thump a purse down on the bar, and ask the barkeep to point out some mercenary smugglers drinking in the corner. The eastern side of the continent was wild and largely uninhabited. It could take days—weeks—to make contact. Malach had hours at best.
Of course, she could just let him die.
In many ways, it would be in her best interests. She had her own currency to negotiate the passage to Dur-Athaara. And she could always give the infant away to someone else, if it survived. Malach was self-absorbed, manipulative and callous. True, he had a crude animal magnetism and displayed occasional wit. He had courage. He despised the Curia, which went into the plus column. Nikola knew she could be callous, too. The child, for example. She felt nothing for it other than a desire to be rid of it as fast as possible.
But Malach was a murderer. He admitted it himself. Who knew what else he had done? What crimes he had committed to seal his vile bargains? An argument could be made that leaving him behind was for the greater good.
So why was she risking everything to bring him home?
She shook her head. It would be a moot point if she didn’t get somewhere before dark. Maybe she’d taken a wrong turn. Other faint tracks crossed this one at regular intervals. Without Malach to guide her, she’d chosen randomly. Bal Kirith could still be a day away for all she knew.
Exhaustion washed over her. She blotted moisture from her forehead. The Morho was like being stuck in someone’s sweaty armpit. And the trees . . . Nikola had never imagined such trees. Their trunks were nearly a hundred meters high and thrust out of a bulging mass of aboveground roots like the buttressed walls of a fortress. Umbrella-shaped crowns blocked out the sky, making it impossible to gauge the direction she’d been driving in.
A few kilometers later, the forest thinned. Fading daylight penetrated the thick canopy and she started seeing stone houses. Most lacked roofs and were tumbling down, but they clumped together in groups of a dozen or so. She turned a bend and the jungle opened up to a wide, serpentine river. The Ascalon. It began in the snowmelt of the foothills at Bal Agnar, meandering south until it divided at Bal Kirith, one branch emptying into the Southern Ocean, the other turning east to join a myriad of smaller waterways that fed into the Kaldurian Sea and its hundred thousand islands.
On the opposite bank was a pitted wasteland. Almost no structures still stood, but it was undeniably the remains of a city, and in the distance, burnished gold by the setting sun, she saw the fractured dome of a basilica.
The river was spanned by a slender bridge and Nikola wondered why it hadn’t been shelled. Perhaps because the knights wanted to preserve their access to the Arx. Either way, the bridge looked sketchy. The iron supports were all right, but the wood struck her as distinctly rotten.
She turned to Malach. His eyes were closed, dark lashes fanned across his cheeks. He looked helpless, vulnerable, not like his asshole self at all. “I ought to throw you in,” she said. “Let the Ascalon take you.”
He mumbled something incoherent.
She stared at the bridge for another long minute, then eased her foot off the brake. Planks creaked under the tires. At several points, she could see the river below through splintered gaps. It was not quite as high as the bridge over the Montmoray, but it was high enough.
She drove very, very slowly.
The road on the other side was more weeds than asphalt, but it ran straight and true to the walls of the Arx. Nikola stepped on the pedal. The car leapt forward, bumping over potholes and fallen branches. At last she came to the broken, twisted gates of the inner citadel.
Nikola braked and sat with the engine running. A mosquito whined in her ear. She swiped at it and rolled up the window. Beside her, Malach had stopped muttering. His breathing was rapid and shallow.
“Well,” she said. “Here we are.”
Nikola Thorn drove through the gates of the Arx.
She knew a good deal about all six cities of the Via Sancta, not because she had any interest in history but because it would take a special effort to work in the Arx for a decade and not let anything trickle into your brain. Bal Kirith and Bal Agnar were the first cities built by the Praefators, and reputedly the most beautiful. The Morho had mines and quarries that produced unique building materials, as well as hardwoods not found anyplace else. The Pontifex’s Palace in Bal Kirith was made of astrum, an igneous rock containing mineral chips that glimmered in moonlight, and leystone, whose veins glowed bright blue in the presence of the power.
Even in their neglected state, the buildings had a grandeur that made the Arx she knew seem a cheap imitation. Every bit of stone was carved with vines and flowers so it looked like part of the jungle. Gilded spires thrust toward the heavens in corkscrews like twists of barley sugar. Even the encroaching decay failed to detract from the beauty of the place—and occasionally enhanced it. Carpets of pink and white wildflowers grew inside an oval structure where the roof had fallen in and exposed the interior to sun and sky. Verdegris oxidized copper statues, moss overran walls and fountains, lily pads floated on still pools, all merging with the jungle in a hundred subtle shades of green.
While the outer city of Bal Kirith had been reduced to rubble, the damage was far less inside the walls. Nikola understood that the Arx had been deliberately spared. Despite the crimes of the nihilim, someone had decided that destroying this place would be a greater one.
It was unsettling not to see a single Ward anywhere.
The battery died in the middle of an empty field. It had
a few trees and the vague suggestion of pathways. Maybe it had been a park before the war. The dome of the basilica was visible not far ahead. Nikola got out and looked around, hands on hips. A chorus of insects hummed in the lengthening shadows.
“Hello?” She reached down and leaned on the horn. A flock of birds exploded from a tree, wings beating for the sky. Somewhere, a bullfrog emitted a lonely foghorn blast.
Movement in the corner of her eye made her turn. A lavish, baroque structure sat to the east, surely the Pontifex’s Palace, with a long reflecting pool whose waters were thick with weeds and algae. The surface looked placid . . . and then a surge of ripples moved swiftly along the length of the pool. Something big lived in there. Nikola got back inside the car.
“Malach,” she said firmly, patting his cheek. His head lolled to the side. His skin felt clammy, and his chest rose and fell too fast. She’d seen it once before in Ash Court, when an ambulance came for an elderly neighbor. The onset of septic shock. His system was going into overdrive.
Nikola bit her lip and looked around. She could drag him to one of the empty buildings, but what would she do with him then? Where the hell was everybody?
The hair on her neck rose up. Funny how one knows when another person is close even if they don’t make a sound. Nikola turned to the driver’s side window. A woman stood outside the car, not a meter away. She had large, dark, intent eyes. Her arms were bare and dirty and covered in Marks. Ugly, crude ones that conveyed anger and suffering merely in the brief instant that Nikola glanced at them. She did not wear gloves. Her nails were long and sharp.
“Are you nihilim?”
The woman stared. She had a patient, unblinking gaze that was almost lizard-like. There was something hungry in that gaze. And something else very wrong, though Nikola wasn’t sure what. She rolled up the window and locked the door. She reached across Malach and slammed his lock down, too. When she looked back, the woman was gone.
There was nowhere she could have run to, not so fast. Had she crawled under the car? Nikola released a slow breath and turned the key, hoping to squeeze a little more life from the battery. It gave the classic quiet click that signaled zero juice.
